Rick Bland and Brook Morgan did [b]Man and Mouse[/b] at the Beehive from the 7th to the 16th. We enjoyed our time at the Beehive. There were good Audiences. Our first Audience was around 35. Of our 9 Shows 4 were full - two of those 4 were packed beyond belief with people sitting on the floor. Our smallest audience was about 20.

The management at the Beehive bent over backwards to make sure our time in their venue was good.

There was never a problem with the sound system or the TV Screen when were were there. Technically, we played all of our cues through my mac. The first show, we used CD's and that proved hilariously disastrous. The second show we played the cues through the mac and on the 3rd show, we played our animation through the mac as well, using a remote control.

There is a backstage area, stage right, that was useful for scene changes.

The lighting state means that the audience was as bright as we are so we fiddled around with different lighting combinations every night and unscrewed the lights over the audience to try to give them a small sense of a divide between the stage and viewers.

We found that the best way to utilize the venue was to keep it casual. So there was no worries about late comers. In fact we preferred having them. We just wove that into the show. And equally, it was no worries if some of the people got up to leave. It seems the area, the high number of weekend stag and hen parties, meant we learned to do selective flyering. If women were orange, super-dressed up, soaked in perfume and covered in make up, we started to avoid them when flyering as they were not really our kind of audience. Likewise, if a group of guys were clearly on a pub crawl, we let them crawl right by and focused on other people. There is a lot of traffic in the grassmarket so was really helpful to flier an hour before our show and capture the spontaneous fringers.

It would be tough to organize but it could be helpful if there was a system to get rid of the used glasses between each show. By 10:30 at night, there were lots of glasses stacked up outside the toilets and lots of glasses inside the room. In our turnover, we did the best we could to get them out of the way, but the bar was so busy it seemed problematic to bring a load of glasses downstairs.

Good points of venue - Management, Room, TV Screen to play animations, location, audiences and growing profile as a venue